The device in the steamer trunk is only partially complete. I have done as much as I can with technology available before mid-century. The system can only be completed with technology from your era. I have enclosed a list of what you'll need. You'll have to search it out and make it all work together, if you choose to perpetuate our responsibility in this and knot your grandfather's knot—our grandfather's knot, and Einstein's knot—in that old Cord.
I hope you will do so, and will find it both a loophole that binds and a knot that frees, as I have. At all events, good luck!
—Michael Sakler
P.S.: That Cord's no hot rod, but it's crucial to the set and setting of the mental state required for this time travel experience. It also works well enough for hauling batteries and getting around New York in 1939, so treat it kindly!
* * * *
Mike slowly folded the letter. Lost in thought, he stroked his beard absently for a while. Well, it's better than the other option for a loophole that binds and a knot that frees, he told himself, remembering his hungover dream of a hangman's noose.
He got up from the table and the chair and stretched. Then he went downstairs, down to the garage/workshop where the Cord sat with its hood up. The sun was shining brightly just beyond the shadows. He got to work.
* * * *
Focused on that work, Mike's days flew by. A certain balance had returned to his life, too: his obsession was no longer a mad one. He returned, at least sporadically, to his ai-ki-do, tae-kwon-do, do-si-do classes. He sent a card of apology to the widow, who unfortunately was not interested in reestablishing contact. During 1998 and early 1999 he even went to temple a few times—something he hadn't done in years.
Maybe the prayers paid off. In June of 1998, he was able to start and run the Cord's engine for the first time—and the completed restoration cost him less than he'd expected. Such was not the case with completing the “Temporal Mobius Generator,” however.
The interface synching his mind up to the machine and capable of inducing the mind-chaos needed for his time trip required state-of-the-art neuro-hookups so expensive he had to take out a second mortgage on his property. They were on the 1939 list, however, so he purchased top-of-the-line units from a “mindware” dealer operating out of a software storefront in a Marin County strip mall.
Using the system he put together, Mike experimented with low voltages to create a map of his own mind's functioning. Taking as his guide the 1939 notes—with their jargon of “ekstasis points,” “temporal dissipation vortices,” and “eschaton particles"—he located regions of his brain that, when stimulated, produced both “out of body experience” and vivid strange-attractor memories of the World's Fair. These, the notes indicated, were vital to the temporal voyage he was to undertake.
By May of 1999 all was in final readiness. A couple of days before his planned time jaunt, he took the now operational and fully equipped Cord on one lengthy test drive—but only one.
That test drive in itself narrowly missed becoming a disaster. Driving the Cord down to the Valley to see his doctor for his routine physical, he felt fine and the car was running fine, but he still almost didn't make it. Pulling off of Herndon Avenue and into the rat's maze of private medical offices surrounding St. Agnes Hospital, he blanked out at the wheel. Only in the last second did he catch himself—and catch the hard left turn he very nearly missed.
When he finally pulled into a parking spot, he was both shaken and relieved. He had narrowly escaped smashing into the cinder-block wall separating the parking lot of his doctor's building from the hospital's parking lot.
Well, he reminded himself as he walked to his appointment, if I'd smashed through the wall, at least I would have practically landed in the emergency room!
The only sign of Mike's brush with Fate was a slightly elevated pulse rate. No trace of a mini-stroke or any other brain glitch that might explain his blanking out just moments earlier. His doctor declared him to be in fine shape, outside of the pulse spike—especially considering his cholesterol and his plaqued arteries and everything else the doctor deigned to lecture him on.
Given Mike's failure to change his diet to save his ticker, the doctor warned him that he would have to remain absolutely faithful in taking his heart pills and would likely still need to have surgery within the year to remove his blood mud. Mike agreed politely but planned on changing nothing because, two days later, he was ready to go.
Into his winged chariot's trunk Mike loaded the big Exide storage batteries that had, until then, provided electrical storage for the solar panels atop the roof of his off-the-grid party house. Despite the fact that his house would soon be going dark, he was in a celebratory mood.
He decided to dress appropriately for the occasion. From the closet in his office Mike removed the full suit of clothes and shoes he'd taken from the trunk so long before and tried them on. All the clothes fit perfectly, as he somehow knew they would.
He looked at himself in the mirror, a man of not inconsiderable years, dressed in a dark suit and tie of a rather conservative cut, topped by a snap-brim hat. Yes, just what the well-dressed time traveler would be wearing in 1939.
He locked up his home. Walking toward the Cord in the driveway, he twice glanced back wistfully toward his huge handmade house. Starting up the Cord, he drove it through evening light along a deserted forest service gravel road until it passed directly beneath the hydroelectric powerlines, where he stopped.
Rigging up a coupling and converter, he linked power from an overhead line to the battery array in the trunk. From the system of dams and turbines on the upper San Joaquin River, he swiped enough of that “clean, safe Democracity energy” to bring the device and the storage batteries up to maximum.
As he decoupled his power tap, he doubted the power company would much notice. A little free juice was the least they owed him, after he'd put up with this power line eyesore all these years.
The fully restored Cord spun gravel on the last stretch of switchbacks before fishtailing up onto the blacktop of Alder Springs Road. Einstein had once contended that imagination was more important than knowledge. At this moment, Mike felt like a living embodiment of that premise.
No machine alone could do what he was going to do. The chaos of brain, the individuality of mind, the singularity of memory: all were indispensable to the reality of travel in time.
Over the blacktop he drove to the summit of the ridge, then stopped the Cord. Its engine thrummed along placidly, idling, as he watched the sun go down. Slowly, the rim of the turning world obscured the light of day. Soon the first stars began to come out.
Mike took off his hat and put on his temples the circlets containing the neuro-hookups. Checking everything one last time, he threw the switches to activate the timers and all the memory systems of all the computers on board, revved the engine as high as it would go, put the Cord in gear, then took his foot off the brake.
He was overcome by a euphoric sensation of floating upward, not unlike what he had sometimes experienced just as he drifted off to sleep and the bed beneath him seemed to fall away. This time, however, there was no hard jerk of ordinary consciousness striking to reassert control.
This time he just kept drifting, a full-blown out-of-body experience bringing his body and the car with it. Faintly he heard the engine sounds breaking up, digitizing, becoming discrete, then wildly dilated, then sounding almost as if they were being played backward.
Through the windshield and windows he saw a fog rising—a type of Bose condensate. Mike seemed to have seen it before: thick yet low, the Tule fog of memory.
He looked up through the windshield and saw a star perched atop a great curving skybridge, like a diamond ring effect seen during a total eclipse of the sun. The bridge was a vast, slightly rainbow-shimmering catenary Mobius curve. From this angle, it looked rather like the St. Louis Gateway Arch, only countless miles high—and it wasn't so much “in” the sky as it somehow was the sky.
The Cord was mo
ving in and through the skybridge, in the ultimate daredevil stunt loop. His own memories ran like cords of fog through the suspended and suspending bridge and tunnel. Particular events in his life possessed their own unique gravity, curving and warping his memoryspace in ways he could not have foretold—
—until the fogbridge did its Mobius fillip and he sat outside the 1939 World's Fair, in sunshine, in the Cord, in the parking lot that would one day become Shea Stadium. Through the windshield he saw the Trylon and Perisphere surrounded by the whole of the Fair, a candied confection of the Future to be consumed by the present.
Too often, for him, black and white was the past, while the future was color. Yet here he was, in the past—and in color. Putting on his hat as he stepped out of the car, Mike was a man inside his own dream.
* * * *
Might as well enjoy myself, he thought. He grabbed a frankfurter with everything at Swift & Company's streamlined super-airliner building, then some ice cream over by Sealtest's triple shark-finned edifice. He paid for them with the antique liberty coins the notes had suggested he bring.
Strolling about the fairgrounds, he saw again how wind-shaped so many of the structures appeared. Buildings that looked as if they'd been designed in wind tunnels. Frank R. Paul mélanges of fins and keels and flanges. Spirals, helices, and domes, their towers topped with zeppelin-mast spires. An airstream wonderland, waiting for the inevitable arrival of Northrop flying wings and Bel Geddes teardrop cars.
Stopping at the base of the Trylon and examining it closely, Mike rediscovered the Fair's secret. Like everything else, the Trylon was intended to look smoothly mass produced, machine precise, and slipstream slick. Up close, however, he saw that its surface was rough, stuccoed with all the “smoothness” of jesso over burlap. Beneath its assembly-line dreams of aerodynamic cowls and zero-drag farings, the great exhibition felt handcrafted—a prototype of the shape of things to come, not a production model.
The future is best viewed from a distance, Mike thought as he approached the Chrysler Motors Building in the Transportation Zone. Remembering its “Rocketport” display, he went inside.
Where he literally bumped into Albert Einstein.
"Pardon me, Professor,” Mike said quickly.
"Not a problem, not a problem,” the Nobel laureate said with a distracted smile, turning back to lean on a railing. Together they watched the Rocketgun simulate another blastoff into tomorrow, with full noise and light special effects.
"They'll probably use it for shooting atomic bombs at each other,” Mike remarked, “long before they use it for passengers."
Einstein gave him a startled look, then smiled wryly and shrugged.
This was the hard part. The only way Mike had been able to come up with to get the great man's attention was the way Klaatu had gotten Professor Barnhart's attention in The Day The Earth Stood Still. Mike couldn't remember how fluent Einstein's English was, but he pressed on quickly nonetheless.
"I know you've been working on unified field theory,” Mike said, pulling a folded sheaf of papers and a card from his coat pocket, “so I thought you might be interested in this."
Unfolding the papers, Mike presented the sheaf to the professor. On the pages he had diagrammed, with explanatory captions, a particularly interesting variant of what would someday be called the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen theorem.
Einstein glanced at the pages, perfunctorily at first, just humoring him. Then the physicist's eyes grew wide as he realized the importance of what he was looking at.
"Wo—Where—?"
"I knew you'd see their merit,” Mike said, gesturing toward the thin sheaf, then handing Einstein the card with his grandfather's name, address, and phone number. “It's been a pleasure meeting you in person, Professor. I can be reached at this address. Let's keep in touch."
"Ja—er, yes!” Einstein said, shuffling papers and card about in his hands so he could shake the hand Mike offered him. Tipping his hat and turning before he melted away into the crowd, Mike was pleased he'd made his Einstein contact already.
Deciding to treat himself to as much of the Fair as possible before he made his way to the Jewish Palestine Pavilion, he toured the Town of Tomorrow. Then it was on to the Immortal Well and its streamlined Time Capsule, scheduled to be opened in 6939 a.d. Next he saw the robots Elektro the Moto-Man and his Moto-Dog, Sparko, perform in the Westinghouse Building.
He felt a childlike awe at General Electric's ten-million-volt indoor lightning-bolt show, and Consolidated Edison's block-long “City of Light” diorama. The line for the GM Futurama was far too long, however. His rendezvous with that tech triumph could wait for another visit.
He made his way through what felt more and more like a planetary county fair, until he at last reached the Jewish Palestine Pavilion. During the day the numbers of spectators for the pavilion's official opening ceremonies had swelled past fifty thousand. On the fringes of the crowd, entrepreneurs sold Jewish Palestine flags, as well as armbands and yarmulkes adorned with the Star of David.
Recalling that his grandfather—though neither Orthodox nor Conservative—had on a lark bought such a yarmulke at the World's Fair today and all those years ago, Mike now bought one as well and put it on, in hope and remembrance.
In his accented English, Einstein himself at last pronounced the words, “I am here entrusted with the high privilege of officially dedicating the building which my Palestine brethren have erected.” Amid the vast, cheering crowd, Mike despaired of finding the old man and boy he was seeking, but he kept looking.
By the time the ceremonies ended, Mike still hadn't found the boy and the old man he sought—not even after the crowd broke up.
Worry, frustration, and anxiety warred within him as he drifted like a lost ghost through the great squares and avenues of the Fair, alongside the Lagoon of Nations, past the pavilions of states and governments. He wandered beneath the closing fireworks, his hope fading like blown starshells. He came to the reflecting pool beneath the Perisphere, at just the moment the great voice of that globe began to sound its eerie tocsin over the emptying fair.
With other stragglers he made his way toward the parking lots, panic rising in his mind. He'd lost them somewhere in the Fair! They were no longer on the grounds anywhere! He banged his forehead with palmed fists. How to find them? How to find them?
Getting into the Cord, he sat and stared through the windshield. He felt forlorn and powerless as a lost child. Not even the play of faerie lights over the Trylon and Perisphere could alter his despondent mood. He leaned his head against the steering wheel and mourned inconsolably.
Yorkville.
The word drifted into his consciousness like a boon from a merciful god. Yes! New York's German-American section, where his grandfather had had his run-in with the street gangsters. It was only a hunch, but as he left the parking lot for the streets he could think of nowhere else to go.
He had maps, but the maps were not the city. He got lost, again and again. By memory he had successfully navigated across sixty years of time and thousands of miles of space, but now he was having difficulty finding his way around New York City!
When at last he made his way into Yorkville, streets and landmarks began to take on the faintest aura of déja-vu familiarity. He began to remember. They'd run out of gas, yes. He had waited in the car while his grandfather had gone to fill up the gas can. His grandfather had been gone a long time—
At the far edge of a streetlight, in a vacant lot, Mike saw and heard it, before he was ready for it. Four young men yelling, "Jude! Unflitiger Jude! Verderber! Teufeljude!" as they pummeled and kicked an old man.
Mike skidded to a stop beside the nightmare tableau and got out of the car.
At the sound of the Cord screeching to a halt, the young men stopped their heavy-booted work. Hearing the car door opening and slamming, one of the men, the smallest, took to his heels. The other three stood their ground, fists clenched.
Mike walked steadily across the lot to
ward them. When he was perhaps fifteen feet away, one of the three abruptly broke away toward something off to one side—a gasoline can. Mike saw the youth take matches and handkerchief rag from his pockets. He knew immediately what the boy intended to do.
While the fire maker fumbled about his work, Mike in battle-dance kata waded into the remaining two, punching and kicking.
An elderly avenging angel, he felt strangely detached, as if in a minor trance. His only barely-conscious thought was an odd little mantra—ai-ki-do, tae-kwon-do, do-si-do, again and again.
He knew he took many blows and strikes, but he gave far more, stomping insteps, roundhouse kicking ribs, smashing noses, snapping collarbones, shattering kneecaps. Even Yorkville street toughs had never encountered such a fighting style. They fled at last, but they had done their damage.
His grandfather, doused about the neck and chest with a slosh of gasoline, was going up in slow immolation. It was all Mike could do to put out the fire with his suit coat. The old man's pulse was thready, but the pain of his burns roused him to consciousness.
"Thank you,” he whispered, coughing blood.
"Grandpa,” Mike said, cradling the old man's head, “it's me, Michael."
"Michael?” asked his grandfather, confused. “How?"
"I know—I'm old,” Mike said, picking his grandfather up awkwardly in a fireman's carry. He headed toward the Cord, heart pounding, talking all the while, adrenalin-delirious, trying to explain. “I know it doesn't seem to make sense. But listen, you've got to believe me. I'm sending you into the future. You'll die of your wounds and burns here. I've come from the future to help you. Having you to save saves me, both as the boy I was, and the old man I'll be."
Mike opened the passenger side door of the Cord and propped his grandfather in the seat. Dazedly his grandfather watched him. Taking Grandpa Sakler's keys and money clip, Mike tossed his own wallet onto the seat beside his grandfather.
"All the ID you'll need to pass for me in 1999 is in that wallet and in the car,” Mike told him. His grandfather nodded weakly, or perhaps he passed out. Coming around past the back of the car, Mike opened up the driver's side door. Slotting his own key on its key chain into the Cord's ignition, he started the car and turned on the temporal Mobius generator.
Analog SFF, March 2008 Page 17